The Cartographer

"Just when I think I have found the way to live, life changes." - Hugh Prather

You cannot live more than three decades without some confusion, at least that's what I've come to believe. When I was six a teacher asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up and the question has never quite left me. I stood there in the play-doh and glue smelling class room, amongst miniature tables and chairs with grass in my hair and mud on my knees and told her I wanted to be a teacher... not because I had a great desire to be one, but because it seemed the polite thing to say to a teacher. Even then I wanted to please people. Maybe especially then.

Unless you are very lucky, or unlucky depending on your personal view, most people are not born with a pre-set path to follow. Its not just the edges of the map that are blank, it's everything. You have to fumble your way forward and if you're not paying attention you can loop around again and again... just like I did.

When I was nine I realized my dad never kept his promises to me; I waited by the door like an abandoned dog for him to show up, knowing fine well he would be hours late or that a call would come after the designated pick-up time to say he wasn't coming because the car wouldn't start or he wasn't feeling well... or just that he was busy. I didn't retreat from him; I clung tighter. I acted tough. I climbed trees and eschewed pink and played in the mud. I dropped gymnastics for rugby and got into fights because it sounded like the kind of life he had. I stretched my small body as far across the gap between us as I could and never quite made it to the other side.

It's very easy to believe someone loves you desperately and simply can't be present rather than accepting that they probably love you in an abstract sense but have things they'd rather do.

At fifteen I got a boyfriend, older than me, tall, played guitar... a little chubby. Impressive only to teenage girls with self-esteem issues. I was awkward, I felt, and too heavy (though now I see picture of myself and that's laughable), and most importantly in my eyes I had a disfigured face. That's how I thought of it; a lump of scar tissue on my lip from a bike accident that healed badly and still felt like a golf ball stuck to my face after two surgeries (though in truth you probably wouldn't have noticed it if you didn't know it was there). I was just so grateful to feel wanted and interesting that I jumped into the quicksand without looking and lost ten years of my life to a boy who constantly compared me to his best friends girlfriend and went on to become a man who is now in jail.

They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but when I trace the path back and down I don't think that's the whole truth. I think its littered with the footsteps of people who just want to be loved... because that's a special kind of hell, isn't it? Throwing yourself at the feet of someone who tells you they're very proud of you while they use you as a doormat.

By sixteen I had been diagnosed with depression and anxiety, I cried at the drop of a hat, I left school and worked for a while before jumping into a college HND, and found some of those friends that make everything better. I saw myself in them; the anxiety, the sadness, the desire to make everyone happy despite it... and I saw how they lit up the rooms they walked into, how they kept their heads up when it got hard. It was easier to them to demand better for themselves than it was to follow my own advice, but sometimes when you help others you're helping yourself too.

The promised salvation of adulthood didn't cure my mental health problems; the map was still blank and the landmarks kept moving. I learned to bend until I ached without breaking. I learned when to stay quiet, when to stay out of sight, and I learned that tears are manipulation when you're arguing with someone who doesn't like to examine their own actions... I learned to drink heavily, often alone, and I learned how to weather the tempers of others with infuriating calm and silence.

And it would have gone on like this forever, I think, because I was not raised to rock the boat. I was raised to be polite and amiable and forgiving, I was told the meek will inherit the earth and though I have never been meek at heart I did my best to shrink into that seat...

But change comes for all of us, and it comes fast in most cases. Like anaesthesia; you feel something happening and then suddenly its all over and you taste blood. From the first prick of the needle that heralded my first facial surgery to the moment I walked out of my ex-fiancés house, I had been sleepwalking. I circled the little patch of the map I knew again and again, looking for buried treasure that didn't exist. I was sedated, in some way, for just over eleven years. But, oh the fall out; the absolute chaos that ensues when the shell cracks.

Over the course of two years I hardened, becoming a clenched fist in human form. The ex was first to go, of course, and even now I enjoy remembering how much he struggled with the sudden ice in my blood. Then dad. I learned what I always knew at heart; that his presence was preconditioned on compliance. I found myself disowned, in therapy, scarred by self harm, jobless, medicated and struggling to define the line between what actually constituted abuse. The phrase 'he never, ever hit me' was scrawled on every landmark... and yet.

I flew to Arizona for my twenty-fifth birthday, over the Sierra Madre mountains, watching the bone dry, red dirt land ripple and thought it looked like a great hand had descended from the clouds to drag the land up to the sky. On the run, running full tilt at the blank spaces in my world, taking too many risks, racking up too much debt. Fucking glorious... but change comes for us all. And sometimes it comes slowly.

The scars are white now, and I'm still medicated, still depressed. Still single, still living at home. I still want to please others, but at thirty-two I have a good job, savings that I won't give away simply because I'm asked to, and don't bend the way I used to. I have learned, in short, the difference between pleasing someone and gratifying them at your own expense. The map is still mostly blank, I think, but there are splashes of isolated detail here and there... islands held apart by what has been forgotten or blocked out. Piecing them together will be the work of a lifetime, but I'm beginning to think there a quiet glory in careful exploration.